Friday, December 27 Headed out on a cool, rainy day by bus to tour Malmo's chocolate factory (Malmo Choklafabrik). The original company started in 1888 and closed down in 1995, a few years after having been bought out. A young couple started a new, small chocolate factory in part of the original factory building and are making use of some of the original chocolate recipes. The tour consisted basically of a talk in a small museum room of the history of the factory and tastes of several kinds of chocolate. And of course at the end of it we all bought a variety of chocolate with our 20% discount! We found the Traingel Train Station nearby and took the train out to the Malmo Arena and the Emporia shopping mall. The mall was mostly high-end shops ... read more

Sunday morning, September 29, we walked around the parks near our place with Kenn & Karen then stopped for lunch at Restaurante Biennale on Via Garibaldi. We each had a different pasta dish and they were all great! And they had free wi-fi with a really strong signal with great high-speed service; our new favourite restaurant! The great internet service sure helped me upload my blog update with 107 photos. It started raining after lunch and we headed home to play “Heads-Up” on Chris' iPad and card games and had lots of fun, snacked on cheese and meat for supper then headed to bed early. Monday morning Kenn & I headed out early to walk all the way across Venice to the San Croce neighbourhood to see about the stove repairs. Incredibly, they were able to ... read more

Our flight arrived into Basel last night and we caught the train directly from the airport terminal to Basel's main train station, directly across the street from Hotel Victoria. Hotel was nice, comfortable bed. Quick sleep, breakfast at McDonald's next door, then caught the train to Zurich. Our hotel, the St. Gotthard, was just one block from the train station so we ran over, dropped off the luggage, then ran back to the station and caught the train to Frauenfeld where Nicolas and Sylvia met us. Short drive to their little cottage on a couple hectares of land, surrounding a little lake full of fish and freshwater lobsters! It was a beautiful location and we had a lot of fun catching up with Nick and Sylvia, eating lobsters, drinking wine from Nick's vineyard, eating fondue, and ... read more

Friday the 13th was yet another cool and rainy day here but with only two days left in Paris, we didn't let that keep us from getting out into the city. We decided to check out Marche Belleville as it only runs on Tuesdays and Fridays. Our Lonely Planet guide book describes it as a "Fascinating entry into the large, vibrant communities of the eastern neighbourhoods, home to artists, students and immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East." We took the metro to the Belleville station and the market was right there as we exited, down the middle of the Boulevard de Belleville, from rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud to rue du Faubourg de Temple, between the Belleville and Couronnes metro stations. It is a tight alley, under a tarped roof, between two long rows of stalls ... read more

Saturday morning was sunny but a little cooler; a perfect day to explore a castle! We chose the Vincennes Castle, about a 1/2 hour by Metro across the city. Vincennes is one of the largest and best preserved castles in Europe. Construction started in the mid-1300's by John II (John the Good) and was completed by his son Charles V (Charles the Wise) around 1370. It served as a military stronghold, a prison, an arsenal and various Royal residences over the years. The wall and ramparts around the castle enclosure is 1,200 metres long, lined with nine towers originally 40 to 42 metres high, surrounded by a 27-metre wide moat filled with water until the end of the 17th century. The 2.6 metre thick curtain wall, rises some ten metres above the average level of the ... read more